Brian Winspear - Finding the Japanese fleet

Transcript

Next day they said, "You better take that plane and go back to Kupang and get the rest. There's still a bunch of eight or ten ground staff there to come back. So you better go and get them".

So we popped off to Kupang and just coming into the back, Kupang is on the north side of Timor and we always used to come around the back and sort of swing around the hills to come into Kupang and we ran slap bang into the Japanese fleet. There was two aircraft carriers and eight ships altogether and luckily, they had just landed. They had about at least 1000 army there, they'd landed them on the beach there and all their planes were over bombing the hell out of Kupang.

So all we could do, we didn't have any bombs, we didn't have any radio batteries because they were all destroyed in the air raid and no parachutes, so all we could do was stooge around and count their ships and have a look at them. We flew at a very low level, but they still tried to have a few pot shots at us. At any rate, then we had to turn around and head back to Darwin.